The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. For example, the evolved universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) is currently being developed. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE), is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards. Standards are currently being defined for release 10 and beyond of LTE, which are also referred to as LTE-Advanced (LTE-A)
LTE provides for the network nodes which provide wireless network access to computing devices to communicate with each other over-the-air, also referred to as over-the-air communications (OTAC). These network nodes are referred to as evolved Node Bs (eNBs) in LTE. OTAC may be used to support flexible spectrum use (FSU) and self-organizing network (SON) features. In this regard, OTAC may support plug-and-play addition of a new network access point, such as a Home eNB (HNB) or local-area eNB (LNB) to a network.
One of the major challenges for OTAC in LTE is coordination of transmissions/receptions of OTAC messages among eNBs which are within the same local area cluster or neighborhood. In this regard, an eNB is only able to receive an OTAC message from another eNB if it is not transmitting an OTAC message at the same time. However, an eNB may be able to receive multiple OTAC messages from different eNBs at the same time if the respective OTAC messages are sent on separate channels such as on different component carriers or on orthogonal resources. Therefore, without coordination of communications between eNBs, contention between OTAC messages may result. For example, without coordination of communications, a first eNB may send an OTAC message to a second eNB at the same time as the second eNB is transmitting an OTAC message. The second eNB may fail to receive the OTAC message sent by the first eNB because of contention between the OTAC messages.
Accordingly, it may be advantageous to provide systems, methods, apparatuses, and computer program products for coordinating communications between network nodes.